Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (23 page)

Then what? He must have fallen asleep.

He dreamed that he grew so old people saw right through him. Then he was young again, a thousand years ago, dreaming in a way that dreams make you new. He saw Uncle Austin on a pier, and a missionary telling him that if he didn’t follow Christ he’d burn in Hell for eternity. “Burn in Hell?” Uncle Austin said. “How hot could it be? And eternity—how long could it be?” The missionary quoted Luke, John, Matthew, Michael, Meatballs until Uncle Austin pushed him off the pier. The missionary windmilled his arms. The Bible sailed from his hands. No angel caught him. He made a big splash and came up swearing. “You want to test a Christian?” Uncle Austin said to young Keb. “Push him off a pier and see what he calls you.” As he said this, his nose became a beak. His eyes grew beady and black. Feathers covered his face. He wasn’t Uncle Austin, he was Raven, the trickster, his great wings flexing against the sky. “I have this relationship with change,” he said. “It keeps changing.” He laughed a back-of-the-throat chortle that rose into a full-bodied croak.

“I forgot to bless the canoe,” Keb said.

“You want to be like me?” Raven said.

“I should have blessed the canoe.”

“You worry too much.”

“When you die, do you see everybody you loved and everybody who loved you?”

“Love, love, love.”

“I should have blessed the canoe.”

“Worry, worry, worry. You simplify your life, Tlingit man, Norwegian man, German, Portuguese, hound dog man. You simplify, but it’s complicated, no?”

“So many people in pain. They need help. Father Mikal says Jesus healed the leopards. Why the leopards?”

“The lepers, he healed the lepers, sick people.”

“Them too. The sick, the meek, the weak. Is there a devil?”

“Only in those people who believe in him.”

“I can’t pee like I used to. When I was young, I could pee my name in the snow. And Yevgeny Restin Gorborukov, oyyee. He could write his name and just keep going, write all of
War and Peace
. He had a bladder the size of Siberia. A good-sized pecker, too.”

“Pecker, pecker, pecker. Feather, feather, feather.”

“Do you want your feather back?”

“What feather?”

“I can’t believe I’m talking to a raven.”

“Believe it.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

“The pain was real, so much pain; they gave me morphine, in Italy.”

“You make no sense; I like you.”

“In the war, we slept on rocks because the rocks were dry and everything else was mud.”

“Mud, mud, mud.”

“There was no meat . . . the people in Italy, they ate pasta, no meat; they were all veggietarries . . . the word you call people who don’t eat meat.”

“Vegetarian. Old Indian word meaning, ‘bad fisherman.’”

“All the children were starving, in the war.”

“War, war, war.”

“Nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be anymore.”

“Wake up.”

“The whites came. They said nobody owned the land unless we had a piece of paper to prove it. The missionaries built six churches in our town. They thought we really needed help.”

“Wake up, wake up, waaaake uuuup.” Raven gave a loud croak and jumped up and down, and flew away.

Keb awoke with a start, confused, heart pounding, hands clasped over his chest, the light low and dusky, the air, cool. He took a moment to remember where he was . . . 
who
he was. An old man with all his accomplishments behind him, until now.
Have I slept all day?
He fumbled for a light and flicked it on. Another sleeping bag was next to his, empty, and next to it, Little Mac’s daypack and guitar case. He struggled with the tent zipper until he got himself outside wearing only boxer shorts, bare feet gripping the wet mossy earth beneath tall, silent trees, his mind slowly retelling what it was like, long ago, to be a young Norwegian Tlingit, living by wits and balance and poise. And toughness, always toughness. Bathing in the sea, fishing waist deep in rivers, spearing salmon, rubbing your skin with rocks, pushing through the cold. Was the other tent nearby? And Little Mac, James, Kid Hugh? Steve the Lizard Dog? Had they left him?
Have they left me?

Is this my place?

He gave himself a moment to let his one good eye adjust. He pulled on some clothes and found the game trail and hobbled his way down to the beach, feeling his way with nine toes. A campfire came into view, the sounds of chatter. Steve barked when Keb smacked his shin into a beach log. Pain shot up his leg, but Keb made no sound, as Uncle Austin had taught him when hunting deer. Swallow your pain. Even when the bear took his toe, Keb didn’t yell. A flashlight beamed onto him. He heard James tell Steve to shut up. James got to his feet. “Hey, Gramps, we thought you were asleep.”

“I’m awake.”

“You hungry?”

“Hungry? Yes, maybe. You never knew your Grandma Bess. She died when your mom was just a teenager, the age you are now.”

“I know. Come on, Gramps, have something to eat. We’ve got lots of food.”

“Now your mom is sick.”

“I know, Gramps. She’ll be okay.”

“I forgot to bless the canoe.”

“Come on down to the fire, have something to eat.”

What they were eating was cigarettes and wine from a box. Seeing Steve sitting there with his lips peeled back, teeth folded into a stupid grin, Keb got the
idea he’d been smoking and drinking too. Most dogs curl up by a fire and fall asleep. Not Steve. He sat with the boys and laughed at their jokes, might have told a few himself. Kid Hugh sat next to him, oiling a Colt .44, spinning the chamber, checking the trigger and action. Little Mac fingered her guitar.

“I’m dreaming a lot,” Keb said. “Dreaming in Tlingit, seeing things, hearing things—xóots shakdéi sa
x
waa.á
x
—maybe I heard a bear’s voice.”

“Not on this island, Gramps. There are no bears on this island.”

Kid Hugh said something about them not being very smart, having a fire on the beach with everybody in Icy Strait looking for them, and Elfin Cove not far away, and the troller fleet just out around the corner. Planes coming, going.

“We’re forty miles from Jinkaat,” James said. “Lots of people build fires on beaches. Fishermen do it all the time.” Kid Hugh shrugged and filled a paper cup and offered Keb some wine. “You see the stars?” James said, pointing to the inky sky. Keb looked up and gave his grandson the satisfaction of nodding. The watery stars had winked out on him years ago. Nothing was as bright as it used to be.

“Clearing storm,” Kid Hugh said.

Little Mac put a heavy shirt over Keb’s shoulders. She gave him a squeeze when she did, and resumed strumming the guitar.

“I like it here,” Keb said.

“Me, too,” James said. “It’s peaceful.”

Did Keb hear a longing between his words, mixed with satisfaction? A blue flame of desire? All his life Keb had known men unconcerned with their own improvement, or with anyone else’s. Lately he’d seen in James a desire to learn and care for others that warmed the old man. Warmed him deeper than any fire. Small gestures, but also big. Remember Jasper Jakes? He never went into the woods or slept on the ground or learned the songs of birds, or received mentorship of any kind. Nobody had high opinions of him so he compensated by having high opinions of himself. Drank himself to death. Remember Conner Young? His style was not to have one, to be invisible, vaporous, scented to persuasion. He stood for nothing and in the end stood not at all. And Todd Bankovich? Hated his job and complained about it up until the day it killed him; got very quiet after that. Never took a canoe journey. And Carla Howe? So sad and precious and all the more precious in her sadness. Such wreckage. So many crushed spirits. How to make a meaningful life? “Get back,” Keb said.
Back, back, back . . . to the land, the sea, the great glacier that shapes everything . . . even you and me
.

“What’s that, Gramps?”

“Get back.”

Little Mac began to strum the guitar with greater force, and the three kids sang words to a song written when their parents were young.

Sitting on a log, Keb wrapped his arms around his knees and pulled them to his chest and rocked to the beat as Little Mac’s voice floated over James’s and Kid Hugh’s, searching for the harmony. Bessie could always sing harmony. Soon James and Kid Hugh were on their feet, wine cups in their hands, dancing in and out of the fire, laughing and leaping over the flames. Not to be left out, Steve ran around the fire and barked as if he too were a rock star.

“It’s the Beatles, Gramps. You like the Beatles, right?”

“The Beatles, yes.”
Bessie liked the Beatles
.

“You hungry, Gramps? I’ll make you something to eat.”

“Tell a story, Keb,” Kid Hugh said.

A story?

The stories that brought greatest satisfaction were the ones Keb had learned from Uncle Austin. “These are not my stories . . .” Uncle Austin would begin. He had learned from his elders, and they from theirs, that story was a place of safekeeping, a bloodline, a tree. Taken together, they were the library of your people. A history. You learned them and preserved them by telling them well. So it was that Old Keb began, “These are not my stories,” and Kid Hugh refilled his cup and the wine made him warm and the night scrolled back on itself and the stars shone brighter than before, entangled in the tops of trees.

WHEN KEB AWOKE, Steve was barking. James and Kid Hugh stood on shore facing the sea, Kid Hugh with the Colt jammed in his belt. The fire was out, the sun up. On the water, not far away, a white yacht lay at anchor, and nearer, two strangers approached in a small inflatable boat, one with his back to the beach, pulling on plastic oars, the other waving. Everything made close—too close—by the clarity of the day.

THE TIDE HAD climbed to within a few feet of the cold-coals campfire. Did the stars still shine overhead, beyond the brilliant blue? Keb rubbed his eyes. He saw James focus binoculars on the lettering on the yacht. “
Etude
,” James said to Kid Hugh. “What’s an etude?” Kid Hugh had the good sense to pull his shirt over the Colt and throw a blanket over the deer rifle.

The two strangers wore red French berets and wide collared shirts, and belts made of hippie ties looped through khaki shorts. “Bonjour,” one called as he stepped ashore.

Little Mac sat next to Keb and said, “
Etude
means ‘study.’”

“Gud murneeng,” the other stranger said. If what he said after that was English, Keb got none of it. Words spilled from his mouth in soft vowels, wet with dew, a birdsong language. When he got no response from James or Kid Hugh, the first stranger walked up the beach to Old Keb, and reached down to give his greeting. Such an angular face: sun-browned, deep-eyed, thick wavy hair, a chin five days from the last shave. Sandal-footed, Mediterranean, halfway around the world. He looked like a prophet forty days into the desert, the kind of man who eats books, not food, his elbows so loose they could bend both ways, his legs like cooked pasta, knobby knees. He seemed engaged with everything around him. He walked farther up the beach, dropped to one knee, held a rock aloft and called to his friend.

The second stranger wheezed by on his own pasta legs, heavier than the first, more fettuccini than spaghetti. The kind of fettuccini Galley Sally used to make. Soon the two Frenchmen had a dozen rocks in their hands, and were chattering like small birds. Out came a hand lens, and a small hammer.

Keb’s head hurt. He regretted sleeping on the beach, and drinking
crappy wine. He asked Little Mac for water. As he drank, a troller plied its way west toward Cross Sound, the mast rolling on a gentle swell. “We need to be more careful,” he said. “Hide better, and bless the canoe. We need Nathan Red Otter to—”

Little Mac left him. Just like that, she got up and walked to the strangers and spoke French. They responded in a waterfall of words. It didn’t slow her down. Keb remembered now. She had spent time in France awhile back, on a school exchange program for maybe half a year, and often wore headphones and listened to language tapes, and sang European songs. After a minute she came back and said to Old Keb, “They’re geologists from Paris. They say they’re here to trace the route of the French explorer LaPerouse, and to study isostatic rebound. They’ve invited us onto their yacht for a shower and something to eat, if we’d like.”

Keb could see James and Kid Hugh packing up from last night, watching the Frenchmen. It was time to get off this bonfire island, get far away. Get the canoe from its mooring inside the sea cave, below the cliff. Kid Hugh had spoken of swimming out to it, or better, working his way along the cliff to reach it by diving into the sea, what he called “a Mexican Margarita Acapulco Loco Dive,” whatever that meant. The kid would strap the Colt to his chest and take the plunge. It might not be necessary now, with help from these pasta-legged Frenchmen, a disappointment to the kid, who itched for action. Keb could see that a large part of the kid wanted to sail off those high rocks to see if he could do it, and if not, to die better than most people died, dying as they did when their clocks ran out, and they ticked their last tock. Or worse, dying before they were dead.

TIME ON THE yacht might not have been the best thing to do, but they did it anyway, riding the hours up the blue water coast, beyond Cape Spencer and Graves Harbor, north to Boussole and Astrolabe Bays. Another world, with big swells coming off the Gulf of Alaska and the
Etude
handling them with ease.

“The canoe’s fine,” Kid Hugh told Keb and James in a manner that didn’t invite discussion. He’d buoyed it deep in the sea cave, and said it was secure. The rifle and totes were back in the tents, hidden deep in the forest, safe on the island.

They had only one gun now, the Colt.

Why do we need a gun?
Keb worried, and said to James, “We have to bless the canoe.”

“We will, Gramps. I promise, we will.”

The rock-hounding Frenchmen had a fancy science lab on board, and hundreds
of geology books and journals. Local news held no appeal to them, near as Old Keb could tell. They never turned on FM or AM radio, and seemed unaware of the minor news story about four canoeists in the Icy Strait region doing their best to avoid capture by well-meaning, safety-minded bureaucrats. Five canoeists if you counted Steve, his run of the yacht limited only by the ship’s cat, a spoiled tom named Voltaire that sat on the bow and licked his yellow fur, his big tongue like a mop. Voltaire belonged to the skipper, a quiet French-Canadian named Rene, who hailed from Rivière-du-Loup on the St. Lawrence River.